Modern Physics and the End of the Year

Exam week is so delightful.  I'm not wholly sure the kids would agree, but it sure is cake for me. I've just got to grade and get ready for graduation rehearsal on Wednesday. Oh right, so I'm the senior class advisor this year, which (thus far) has been good on all counts. Even when the seniors pulled their final prank (silly string at the end of the awards ceremony) they had a strong enough collective conscience that they picked it all up when it was over (yay!). 

But before I get too far away from the end of the year, I want to pause a bit and reflect on my favorite unit of the year: topics in modern physics. During this unit I start with a series of 4 lectures because... well... everyone needs to have at least a few foundational pieces in place before they can go forward. These include: Special Relativity, Young's Double Slit Experiment, An Electron in a Box, and Entanglement. From there the kids are assigned certain topics to research and report back to the class on their findings. These topics include: 

Black Holes, Wormholes, and Hawking Radiation

General Relativity and the curvature of space time

Fractals, Chaos Theory, and Conway's Game of Life 

String Theories, M-Theory and other Theories of Everything

Supersymmetry and the subatomic zoo

Godel's Incompleteness Theorem 

AI and the physics of consciousness

Superconductors 

Quantum Computing

I think there's more, but that's the short list. Anyway, I frequently feel hesitant to teach this stuff because well... it might be different in 5 years, and who knows if it's even real? Well, the response I got from the kids was remarkably positive. They said it was "the most interesting unit all semester" and that it ought to be longer next year. Interesting. It's last in the semester for a reason, namely as a preventative measure for senioritis. So it has the unfortunate fate of having whatever time it can be afforded before the end of the year and no more, really. But I suppose that's an appropriate fate for a topic whose validity depends on every successive issue of Scientific American.